another word Ryan headed up the stairs toward the landing. When he reached it he had to crouch to avoid hitting his head on the doors above them. He signaled the others to join him.
“What now?” Krysty asked as the rest of the group reached the landing. Only Dean was able to stand up straight, but even he had to duck his head a bit to avoid hitting it against the heavy overhead doors.
Ryan pushed his right forearm against one of the doors. It didn’t budge. For the second try he put away his SIG-Sauer and pushed against the door with both arms. This time the door moved slightly.
“J.B. and Jak, one on either side of me,” Ryan said.
The Armorer and the albino took up positions to Ryan’s left and right and got ready to push on the door. The rest of the group readied their blasters.
“On three,” Ryan said. “One, two…”
On three they all pushed together. The door moved, and they could hear the metal hinges cracking, an understandable protest considering the hinges likely hadn’t moved in close to a century.
“Again,” Ryan urged.
Once more the three men pushed against the metal door. At last it began to move, allowing dirt, dust and daylight to spill down through the long crack that had opened up above them. They continued to push, but now Doc had joined them, giving just the little extra force they needed to get the door fully open.
The portal became lighter and lighter, then flopped over like a top hatch on a war wag. With the first door opened, they set to work on the second. It moved more easily than the first, and they soon found themselves standing at the edge of a long-abandoned farmer’s field, with nothing around them but knee-high grass, high stands of rocks and clumps of weeds covering acres of rolling land in every direction.
Ryan and the others took a look around. A stand of trees grew some fifty yards to their left, but mostly they saw only wide-open spaces. Farther on, perhaps a mile or two away, there were more wooded areas, and then more farmland.
“Any idea where we are now?” Krysty asked.
J.B. lowered his glasses. “Middle of nowhere’d be my guess.”
Ryan climbed up and out of the hole in the ground and onto the field. He immediately turned back to help lift out the others. In minutes they were all standing on firm ground.
“Close it up,” the one-eyed man ordered, putting a hand under the edge of one of the doors. With J.B.’s help, he lifted the door and let it fall. He hadn’t intended for it to make such a loud noise as it closed, but without anyone on the landing to ease the door into place, the noise couldn’t be helped. Jak and Doc lifted the second door and let it down on top of the first. It closed with a slightly smaller bang, but still one loud enough to attract attention.
With the doors closed, the exit to the gateway was nearly invisible. The ground was disturbed slightly, but after a few sweeps of their feet and hands, there was no evidence of anything unusual lying just beneath the surface of the field.
“Well, it’s definitely one-way,” J.B. said.
“Mebbe for escape,” Jak offered.
An escape hatch was definitely a possibility. That seemed to fit with the sparseness of the installation’s construction and outfitting. Anyone coming through this gateway was on a one-way trip, but why would such an installation be needed, and why here? Both questions, like all the others, Ryan knew, would be answered in time.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc thundered.
Ryan turned in time to see Doc’s feet being pulled out from under him by a strange mutie that had apparently crawled through the grass toward them. It was crouched low to the ground and seemed to move on all fours, like a spider. It was gnawing on Doc’s leg, trying to tear away the material of his pants in order to get at the pale white flesh that lay beneath.
Before the other members of the group could raise their weapons, Ryan had leveled his blaster and squeezed off a single shot that caught the mutie in the shoulder. The impact of the blast rolled the mutie away from Doc’s leg. As the one-eyed man prepared to get off a second shot at the mutie’s skull, a blaster roared on his right.
A neat black hole appeared in the middle of the mutant’s forehead, and a baseball-sized mass of gray matter and gore exploded out the back of the creature’s skull, taking its miserable life along with it.
Ryan turned and saw Mildred lower her blaster.
A little embarrassed by being taken unawares, Doc got to his feet, unsheathed his sword and was about to run the mutie through when Jak’s voice stopped him.
“More.”
Ryan looked across the field toward the nearby stand of trees and could see that there were at least half a dozen more of the hungry muties ambling toward them. They were all bone thin, filthy dirty and naked except for a flap of material around their midsections. They moved low to the ground, like spiders, hidden by the grass, but betrayed by it as their bodies pushed the tall grass under and left a trail across the field that any scout could follow.
“Hold your fire!” Ryan ordered. He had his blaster leveled, but he wasn’t sure that the muties were going to try what the first one had. And as he watched, his instincts turned out to be right. Instead of attacking the members of the group, the half-dozen muties crawled up to their dead brother and immediately set into its body with their teeth and hands. In minutes they were feeding wildly on the carcass, ripping into its flesh and muscles with all the savagery of a pack of starving wolves.
“Cannies,” Ryan muttered.
“And crazed ones to boot,” Mildred offered.
“Looks like they’ll be busy for a while,” Ryan said.
“So which way do we go?” J.B. asked.
“Feel anything, lover?” Ryan asked Krysty.
The fiery-headed woman closed her eyes and concentrated for a moment, trying to see if she could sense any nearby danger. “Can’t feel anything at all.”
“Okay, then, let’s head up that rise to get the lay of the land. I’ll take point, then Krysty, Jak, Dean, Doc and Mildred. J.B., you cover the rear. Okay, people, let’s go.”
Chapter Two
There was fear in her eyes, and Baron Franz Fox liked it. She was terrified of him, afraid of what he might do to her or what he might give others permission to do to her.
“It’s been five months since your last,” Baron Fox said softly. It was a statement, but both the baron and the woman knew it was intended more as a question. He placed his hands together, the fingertips pressing against each other. “Well, I’m waiting.”
The woman was in her early forties. She was heavy-set, especially in her hips, and her breasts sagged, which was to be expected after giving birth to five children in the past forty-eight months. She was dressed in a thin white T-shirt that left her big dark nipples clearly visible through the worn cotton fabric. She also wore a pair of old denim shorts and pair of fairly new black Western boots, her reward for delivering a set of twins a couple of terms back. The outfit would
